A technical history of Acorn Computers

It would appear you can watch Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser watch Micro Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk -- and then have a post-viewing chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4I2ktcWdJM

"I saw the first five minutes and had to run away, because I couldn't bear to see myself portrayed by Martin Freeman" -- Chris Curry

It's an entertaining watch, although a fair bit of dramatic licence is taken when depicting various anecdotes that would be well-known to readers of The Micro User and similar magazines of the time.

Some time when I have some spare time I must fish out a Pi and try it out - I was deeply envious of the Archimedes owner I knew back in the day!

For anyone interested in the very early Acorn era, there are some replica boards available here, from System 1 all the way up to System 5:

https://theoddys.com/acorn/replica_boards/replica_boards.htm...

That’s how I started as well. Much nicer to program than the spectrum, and taught me about parsing in the worst way when I discovered my text adventure couldn’t have a variable called torch because it was. Parsed as to rch.

Ditto. Electron and Elite with a voltmace joystick that (memory may be hazy) had like 20 buttons on it was mind blowing to child me.

Same, and now I'm still playing Elite but just with slightly better graphics :-D

O man, good times. I remember soldering RAM chips "piggyback" style, then upgrading to 64K of RAM, and adding 8 special-purpose ROMs (from utilities to a spreadsheet program). I even installed a color video board— all of this inside the Acorn Atom itself (which was a keyboard-style computer, similar to the C64).

The Atom also brought together a community of hardware and software enthusiasts through Atom Computer Clubs. These clubs were doing amazing things, including the development of Z80 co-processors and even running CP/M. While Acorn moved on from the Atom to the BBC Microcomputer, the clubs kept the Atom alive well beyond its prime.

It’s fascinating to look back and realize that the same team behind the Atom went on to create the ARM processor, which, interestingly, shares a striking similarity in its instruction set with the 6502.

I bought an Atom second-hand, it was my first 'own' computer. My father first had a TRS-80 model III and then an IBM clone XT. So the Atom was definitely less capable, but it was my own. I read all the accompanying manuals front to back and I read the computer magazines that came with it and this is how I learned English. I was 9 years old at that point. It came with schematics and of course I opened the case. I could not get the thing to load or save data on my dad's tape recorder. And it was only so much fun trying to type in a program from a listing which I could not save, especially taking into account my limited typing skills at the time and the fact that I had to do this while the Atom was attached to the TV in the living room. Still, it was a worth wile and forming experience and surely worth my pocket money.

Later on in life, end of 90s, I was re-wiring the building of my students union, with a friend. Many amps main board, 380 volts, 40 circuits or so, kind of big install. We had to create plans and supply them to get approval from the city or the utility company or the architect or such. For this we used the Archimedes of some guy that helped us. At this point the Archimedes definitely was dead as a platform, Windows 98 was just out. But it was still possible to use it to create drawings and schematics and quite capable.

I purchased an Acorn Atom from a guy, who assembled one himself. He also helped me upgrade to 12K RAM. Later I got a couple of joysticks, a dot matrix printer and a colour/color card.

It was great, but I soon got hold of a second hand BBC B a couple of years later, and then I was sold.

I eventually got an Archimedes 440 that I used for many years.

There are plenty of links on other pages that lead to functional websites of various vintages (the keyword being vintage). Just go to https://www.mcmordie.co.uk/ and start exploring.

I particularly liked the tiling background, which may well have been created using Texture Garden https://texturegarden.com/ by Tim Tyler (of Repton fame, for the BBC Micro fans)

I suspect that the Pi 400 kit is a nod to the Archimedes 400 series, but I haven't seen anything to confirm this.

I think it was possibly the first to go into a desktop computer.

ARM250 datasheet here: https://home.marutan.net/arcemdocs/ARM250.pdf

For Acorn, this chip really helped to bring costs down for the A30x0/A4000 machines - the Electron of the Archimedes era. The RiscPC equivalent was the A7000/A7000+ with the ARM7500/ARM7500FE, the FE being novel for the inclusion of the FPU which ARMs had traditionally not included.